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Surely there's a smarter approach to smart cities?

This is a guest post by Usman Haque, founder of Pachube.com, director at Haque Design + Research and CEO of Connected Environments

For almost a decade, corporate giants like IBM and Cisco have been banging the smart city drum and, frankly, the beat is getting a little boring. We've long been promised great things: more energy efficient power grids, an end to traffic jams and even rubbish bins that let you know when they're full.

The truth is, all of these "smart city" initiatives actually only reflect the most basic functionalities of the Internet of Things (IoT). The true potential for smart cities is so much greater, so much more interesting, and so much more important.

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Bin the smart trash cans These days, every major IT company is looking for its slice of the smart city pie, given the projection that annual spending on smart city technology will reach $16 billion by 2020. In 2008, IBM launched its Smarter Planet initiative, a broad programme to investigate the application of sensors, networks and analytics to the most tricky urban issues. Meanwhile, Cisco has launched a Smart+Connected Communities division to commercialise sustainable approaches to urban environments.

Despite the subtle differences in these approaches, in both IBM and Cisco's eyes smart cities predict the convergence of smart information and communication technologies to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of urban systems and services.

Whether we are talking about IBM deploying an Operations Centre in Rio to combine data from 30 urban agencies, or Cisco's partnership with the Metropolitan Transit Authority in New York to improve rail and station monitoring,

these attempts approach the evolution of smart cities from fundamentally the wrong direction.

Both initiatives are looking for a one-size fits all, top-down strategic approach to sustainability, citizen well-being and economic development. In short, their strategies focus on the city as a single entity, rather than the people -- citizens -- that bring it to life.

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Any adequate model for the smart city must focus on the smartness of its citizens and encourage the processes that make cities important: those that sustain very different -- sometimes conflicting -- activities. Cities are, by definition, engines of diversity so focusing solely on streamlining utilities, transport, construction and unseen government processes can be massively counter-productive, in much the same way that the 1960s idealistic fondness for social-housing tower block economic efficiency was found, ultimately, to be socially and culturally unsustainable.

We, citizens, create and recreate our cities with every step we take, every conversation we have, every nod to a neighbour, every space we inhabit, every structure we erect, every transaction we make. A smart city should help us increase these serendipitous connections. It should actively and consciously enable us to contribute to data-making (rather than being mere consumers of it), and encourage us to make far better use of data that's already around us.

The smart city starts with you The "smartness" of smart cities will not be driven by orders coming from the unseen central government computers of science fiction, dictating the population's actions from afar.

Rather, smart cities will be smart because their citizens have found new ways to craft, interlink and make sense of their own data.

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Smart cities cannot be defined by one application, or central organising body, that sets pre-programmed limits. They will be defined by individual citizens, who are anxious to collaborate with each other -- to create devices and applications that solve specific local problems. Smart cities will be places that foster creativity, where citizens are generators of ideas, services and solutions, rather than subservient and passive recipients of them.

Like Jane Jacobs, I believe that citizens will shape the cities of the future for themselves, creating "spontaneous order from below".

This is an approach that makes more sense, given the current economic reality worldwide. Can a city like Rio -- one that is currently struggling financially to support basic social programs -- really "sensor enable" every street, traffic light, police car and more? And even if it could find funding for the sensor hardware and installation costs, the on-going maintenance would be enormous. The sheer volume of accessible data being transmitted would force huge investment in data centres and other IT infrastructure.

But let's say IBM did all of that. It would still have forgotten that smartness is not just about efficiency (e.g. using less power) but crucially also about creating a flexible system that can dynamically adjust to changes, one that responds to unpredictable phenomena in a way that is not planned, and that harnesses the creative capacity of inhabitants.

Citizens should be able to adjust and rewire the smart city as needed to solve problems and overcome obstacles in their own lives.

Smart systems cannot just be installed atop a city, and then maintained as the unchanging status quo forever. The smart city gets reconfigured every day.

The role of governments and corporations Corporations and governments certainly have a major role to play in the smart city -- by making data openly available for coders to build upon -- but it's not just about making data public; it's also about the public making data. So they must also make it easy for citizens themselves to create and contribute their own data.

For example, there are currently dozens of official air quality monitoring systems in place in cities throughout the world. They provide good information about general pollution levels at a neighbourhood scale and making this data available to the public could be beneficial. But the information is useless for a citizen that actually wants to make decisions: most people don't have the financial freedom simply to move house just because their neighbourhood has bad air.

A citizen-led air quality monitoring system would see measurements taken at a much higher resolution in places (e.g. at the height of a children's stroller) that the official network just doesn't reach. Children could learn which side of the park to play on. People could decide to walk different routes to work. They could measure the specific impact of their own cars. They could learn more about the real-time impact of attempts to improve their local air quality, for example by planting greenery around or inside their homes. They could easily experiment with and share strategies with each other. None of this is possible if they're merely passive consumers of someone else's data.

So there's also an important role for government to play in terms of mandating compliance with common frameworks, open standards and structured-data formats. How much easier would it be for a community to build programs around their data, for example, if a municipality made it a requirement of commercial licensure that businesses publish their data through an appropriately-defined API?

And, of course, there are some things that can only be accomplished at scale, particularly the kind of heavy infrastructural investments that underwrite robust, equal, society-wide access to connectivity. So the rollout of mobile coverage and broadband connectivity will still be very much in the hands of organisations and governments.

No golden bullet The entry of pervasive computing into the city cannot be seen as a "one-stop-shop" that will solve all of our problems from pollution to traffic management. Despite the best intentions of Cisco and IBM, connecting systems and bridging data will not by itself solve tough issues. At best, such systems will likely just provide greater visibility of urban problems.

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However, empowering citizens to find and build their own solutions dynamically may yet allow the full potential of smart cities to be realised.

Ideas Bank is a new section on Wired.co.uk that houses opinionated guest posts on any "Wired" topic. Check out the guidelines here and send your ideas for guest posts to pitches@wired.co.uk, FAO Olivia Solon